Historians have tended to view postwar labor migration, including the Turkish-German case, as a one-directional story whose consequences manifested within host country borders. This chapter complicates this narrative by arguing that Turkish migrants were mobile border crossers who traveled as tourists throughout Western Europe and took annual vacations to their homeland. These seasonal remigrations entailed a three-day car ride across Central Europe and the Balkans at the height of the Cold War. The drive traversed an international highway (Europastraße 5) extending from West Germany to Turkey through Austria, socialist Yugoslavia, and communist Bulgaria. Migrants’ unsavory travel experiences along the way underscored East/West divides, and they transmuted their disdain for the “East” onto their impoverished home villages. Moreover, the cars and “Western” consumer goods they transported reshaped their identities. Those in the homeland came to view the Almancı as superfluous spenders who were spending their money selfishly rather than for the good of their communities. Overall, the idea that a migrant could become German shows that those in the homeland could intervene from afar in debates about German identity amid rising racism: although many derided Turks as unable to integrate, they had integrated enough to face difficulties reintegrating into Turkey.

The introduction presents Rogers as a figure straddling major divides in American history. He was a Cherokee Indian seeking suceess in a WASP society, and a cowboy from the rural republic of the nineteenth century who becomes a wildly popular humorist, writer, and movie star in the urban society of the twentieth century. In particular, it frames him as a historical figure reflecting four important shifts in this era: the end of the frontier, the development of a consumer culture of abundance and personality, the emergence of modern celebrity, and the sharpening of a populist ethos in culture and politics. Finally, it frames Rogers as a historical mediator who helped Americans ease their way from one historical era to another.

Chapter Six explains how Rogers contributed greatly to a media revolution that reshaped American culture in the early 1900s. Beginning in 1922, he reached a vast new popular audience by becoming a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist (first with a weekly column, then a shorter daily one), writing regulary for magazines, making advertisements, cutting phonograph records, and making sporadic appearances in the new medium of radio. He also updated the old tradition of the lecture,regularly traveling throughout the nation to appear before audiences in town halls, lyceums, and churches. Throughout, Rogers deployed his talents as a cracker-barrel philosopher and down-home wit to interrogate America’s move to embrace a new consumer, urban, leisure-oriented culture.

Chapter Seven digs deeper into Roger’s commentary to uncover his attempts to explain the essence of American values. He consistently probed what it meant to be an Americanand did so with wit and insight. Roger stressed several qualities that he believed defined his society: a veneration of ordinay people and a concern for their well-being, a suspicion of social and economic elitism, a respect for the work ethic,and a belief in social egalitarianism and economic opportunity. Rogers’ populist mind-set caused him to locate "the American soul" in common people. He saw the best of American tradition in William Jennings Bryan, the best of modern innovation in aviator Charles Lindbergh, and the ideal combination in industrialist Henry Ford. Ironically, after years of imbibing his humorous reflections, many people concluded that the nature and meaning of America appeared when Rogers looked in the mirror. He became the keeper of the American soul.

During this period consumerism developed apace, so that the society of Debussy’s world closely resembles our own in its fondness for shopping as a form of recreation. This was due in part to growing prosperity, at least amongst the middle classes, and increased leisure time. Fine dining, though hardly new, was also an aspect of growing consumerism. Debussy was a product of his time in his fondness for good food and collecting it. from local dealers. Especially pertinent to Debussy is the manner in which music was consumed as a leisure activity, for he catered for the demand for ‘leisure’ music in his early songs and piano works. Developing rapidly in this period of prosperity and stability was tourism, which Debussy participated in, if not from choice, certainly from the preferences of his wives and mistresses. Understanding this part of Debussy’s environment and appreciating Paris’s centrality on the European map (with many borrowings from Great Britain, including afternoon tea and whisky, both much to Debussy’s taste) throws light on Debussy the man as he negotiated the free time that many periods of inactivity as a musician created.

Focused on metropolitan consumer centres in which new sexual identities were bought and sold, this chapter explores how mass-market businesses stimulated, satisfied, and contained female desires, often at the same time. Consumer behaviours are a nexus of bodily and psychic desires understood through a language of seduction. Since the mid-nineteenth century, businesses have channelled, commodified, and promoted female sexuality to sell new products, shopping spaces, and leisure activities. Cities offered both licit and illicit, sexual and consumer pleasures. Their urban geographies are the living proof of our argument that in modern capitalist societies, sexuality is a commodity, commodities often are erotic, and the spaces and communities in which they are exchanged contribute to the making of consumer and sexual subjectivities. The marketing of eros therefore did not simply emerge with the twentieth-century sexual revolution, but rather was central to the history of modern capitalism. By examining the overlapping histories of the marketing of female consumer and sexual pleasures in diverse places, this chapter explores the role of sex and sexiness in the modern marketplace and challenges liberal assumptions about agency, liberation, and progress embedded in the history of the sexual revolutions of the late twentieth century.

Within a few decades following the end of the Second World War, Germany moved from a country of middling wealth per capita to one of the wealthiest countries in the world. In the meantime, the Japanese, very poor indeed in 1945 in spite of a strong showing in terms of industrialisation and technology, joined that select club only about a decade after the Germans. At the same time, Germans and Japanese became in general more economically equal. This is reflected in the rise of consumerism in both countries, and increasingly the nations’ affluent consumers showed no hesitation whatsoever in purchasing domestically manufactured white goods and many other products. In doing so, they helped power the countries’ respective economic miracles. Moreover, their purchases and savings also made the companies that produced the goods more financially secure while at the same time enabling increasing levels of technological capability. This provided a sound basis for those firms to move ever more aggressively into export markets by the end of the first quarter-century after the war’s end. West Germany forged into these export markets earlier than the Japanese, who were less reliant on export for growth.

Swift’s world was a material one, influenced by his experiences of the institutionalisation of British imperialism, mercantile capitalism, science, medicine, philosophy, the book trade, party politics, and aesthetics. This chapter focuses on a single category of material culture of especial importance in Swift’s writings: consumer goods. The early part of this chapter sets out the essential background on the ‘consumer revolution’ in the early eighteenth century, before addressing its influence on Swift’s writings: in particular the pamphlets concerned with Irish manufacturing, and his fascination with the material culture of women’s dressing rooms.

Looking at London, a relatively prosperous area between the wars, this chapter points to the persistence of ambiguous memories of the inter-war period, with partial achievements in social reform, efforts to halt international conflict, and decent standards of consumption recognised alongside poverty, unemployment, and the slide towards war. This chapter establishes some of the challenges that people faced in passing on stories about the past to younger generations shortly after the Second World War, in a landscape in which different political parties were competing to ‘fix’ the memory of the inter-war decades in place.

The world is undergoing unprecedented change as a result of global population increases, rapid urbanization, and the acceleration of affluence in developing countries, which leads to increased consumption of resources and impactful emissions.

The book’s coda addresses an economic and cultural shift in national focus from production toward consumption that took place in response to the theory that the Depression was a “crisis of underconsumption.” According to this logic, capitalism could best be salvaged by stimulating consumer buying power, and thus by bolstering demand for the emerging commodities associated with what Rita Barnard has called the “culture of abundance.” This book thus concludes by proposing that a Depression-era gravitational shift from a producerist model associated with Fordist industrialism toward the mass consumption that would define the postwar period was paralleled by a displacement of the notion of the writer (or poet) as a producer toward one of the writer (or poet) as consumer. This poetics of mass consumerism can be seen in its offing in the Depression-era work of George Oppen and Mina Loy, but it reaches its fullest expression in the postwar poetry of John Ashbery, as well as the work of more recent poets such as Robert Fitterman and Juliana Spahr.

In this chapter I identify several important questions consumerism raises regarding moral education, and conclude by considering how moral education can address consumerism in several important ways. In doing so I explore the extent to which the moral and political aims of education intersect, noting consumerism’s moral implications for democracy, citizenship, and public life in general. Not only are advertising and marketing the “new educator” but consumerism is also undermining the more conventional or noncommercial kinds of education. Moral education always takes place in a social and political context, which today is increasingly dominated by consumerism. I argue that schools, which are foundational in the formation of the moral and civic identities of future democratic citizens, are still a crucial locus of resistance against the forces of consumerism. Given the moral implications of the dominance of consumerism in the contemporary world, there is an urgent need to address consumerism in modern moral education.

Chapter 4 focuses on magicians’ clients. Adopting a similar format to Chapter 3, it begins with a summary of the way clients were portrayed in didactic texts, isolating some key characteristics that were persistently applied. Again, these are unflattering, and the rest of the chapter is dedicated to establishing the extent to which they were accurate. We see that popular portrayals of clients are often more sympathetic, and that, if the court records are anything to go by, the range of people who visited magicians was very diverse. We also find that clients were aware of the negative reputations they might garner, and as such tried either to hide or justify their activities. Finally, we see that clients, especially in the late medieval period, were very aware that they were indeed clients. As such, they carried certain expectations about what they would receive from a magician and were even prepared to seek redress when disappointed. This assertive stance may have become more aggressive as the period progressed and fear crept in over the potential link between witchcraft and other forms of magic. Simultaneously, new legislation outlawing various types of practical magic probably led to a drop in clients seeking formal redress.

This chapter examines the role that race and ethnicity play in the works of David Foster Wallace. More specifically, I am interested in what I identify as a key contradiction in the writer’s bibliography: how his hyper-attentiveness to the ways in which late capitalism inundates contemporary life fails to account for how that same late capitalist logic simultaneously acts to racialize and subjugate communities of color. Through readings that span the author’s career – from Signifying Rappers and “Authority and American Usage” to Infinite Jest and The Pale King – I explore how Wallace finds himself unable to openly navigate questions of race and discrimination and by so doing reproduces late capitalism’s project to buttress dominant ideology while outwardly projecting a self-conscious, anti-racist rhetoric. Ultimately, I deem Wallace’s inability to account for race in his critique of hyper-consumerism as symptomatic of a larger critical tendency to overlook racism’s inextricable connection to capitalism (what Cedric Robinson terms as racial capitalism).

After the Neolithic transition, arguably the most important economic shift was the industrial revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution, for the previous 10,000 years, the world relied (almost) exclusively on small-scale agriculture or pastoralism for economic production. The industrial revolution, starting largely with the development of the steam engine, had a profound effect on the material relationship of the individual to economic production, as individuals became part of industrial production. This change also had significant impacts on demographics: cities grew as the economics drove mass migrations away from rural areas to industrialized areas. Industrialization also had a long-lasting effect on politics, as workers organized to make improvements in working conditions and shift the power balance between labor and capital. Marxism was born of this struggle, and I explore the premises behind this philosophy, and the reasons for expansion as well as ultimate failure of this profoundly influential economic model. Here I speak to the contradictions between modern humanism and the authoritarian application of Marxism, drawing in the discussion on chaos and complexity and the difficulties with attempting central control on something as complex as a national economy.

Material culture studies have long incorporated analysis of domestic environments and dynamics of home in shaping culture, rituals of power, and more. This chapter examines the centrality of home, domestic environments, and communal living experiments to understanding people.

Don DeLillo's work is known for addressing certain topics in depth; among these are television and consumerism. Most articles focus their attention on White Noise; however, if one reads pretty much any work by DeLillo, mass media – newspapers, radio, television, film, the internet, in addition to the mass consumption and information overload that comes with them – will be present either as a major thematic concern or a steady, omniscient buzz in the background. For the handful of texts in which it is not, particularly those of the twenty-first century, their characters often retreat to almost uninhabited and occasionally downright inhospitable settings, making the near absence of technology all the more palpable. Written before the release of The Silence (2020), this chapter demonstrates how DeLillo’s body of work – from Americana (1970) to Zero K (2016) – documents how mass media since the mid-twentieth century has helped shape individual identity, culture, and history in the USA, as well as anticipating some of the dangers mass media man poses to contemporary society.